Page 279 - A GRAMMAR OF BHOJPURI _ PhD Dissertation 2020 TU

8.2 Case marking system
Case is a grammatical category to identify the syntactic relationship among

words in a sentence. In most cases, case typically marks the relationship of a noun to a
verb at the clausal level, or of a noun to a pre/post position before/after another noun
at the phrasal level. Simply, the inflection of nouns is called declension and such

individual declensions are called cases that together form the case system. In other
words, case is actually syntactical relationship of the noun to other verbal elements in

the sentences. This section deals with the cases and their marking system.
Typologically, the languages of the world exhibit remarkable diversity in

grammatical case marking. Givón (2001a:201-9) observes the three systems so far:
active-stative (coding semantic roles), ergative-absolutive (coding transitivity) and

nominative-accusative (coding pragmatic function). Bhojpuri employs the
pragmatically oriented nominative-accusative case-marking strategy as its close
neighbours Chitoniya Tharu (Paudyal 2013:109), Maithili (Yadav 1996:70-1) and

Awadhi (Saksena 1937/1971:126) do. In such languages, according to Givón
(2001a:203), the case-marking morphology is keyed towards coding the

grammaticalized subject (nominative) and direct-object (accusative), regardless of
semantic roles or transitivity. S and A are treated the same, and P differently in

Bhojpuri. This phenomenon is shown in Figure 8.1.
Figure 8.1: Bhojpuri case marking strategy

S
P
A

Source: Khatiwada (2016:90)

As shown in Figure 8.1, in Bhojpuri, the subject of an intransitive clause and
the agent of a transitive clause are treated in one way (nominative) and the patient of a

transitive clause is treated differently (i.e., accusative), as shown in (34a-b).
(34) a. राम आइल ।

rɑm ɑil

rɑm ɑ-il
rɑm come-3SG.PST
'Ram came.' (Boodhoo, 2010:28)

b. मलाह डेङी खेई ।

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